Bird's nest and ferns: Fidelia Bridges.

Abstract

Aflash of color or a snippet of birdsong brightens the landscape in grove or grassy meadow, and watching or listening tomembersof themyriadbird familiescan be entertaining and inspiring. A robin’s peppy roundelay at dawnmay render the alarm clock irrelevant for a late sleeper, but it provides a note of cheer and a sense that all is well. The airy, expressive scenesof songsters and their environspainted by Fidelia Bridges (1834-1923) have appeal for both armchair wildlife enthusiasts and birders in their Wellies with binoculars in hand. Born in Salem, Massachusetts, to a seafaring captain and his wife, Bridges endured the early loss of parents: her father died in China in 1849 and her mother passed away in 1850. Hardship ensued for the family with assets such as their home being sold to settle debts, and the eldest sibling Eliza started up a school. In 1854 the Bridges sisters, including a third sister, Elizabeth, moved to Brooklyn, New York, where Eliza continued in education until tuberculosis prevailed; in 1856 Fidelia would lose her to the disease. Bridges had received instruction in drawing but her occupation became that of governess. A benefit of being in Brooklyn was proximity to artistic activities, and Bridges likely viewed the 1857 American Exhibition of British Art featuring the Pre-Raphaelite genre in New York (Hill MB. Fidelia Bridges: American Pre-Raphaelite. New York, NY/North Amherst, MA: New Britain Museum of American Art/Berry-Hill Galleries/Jeffrey R. Brown Fine Arts; 1981:147; Manthorne KE. The voice of nature: The Art of Fidelia Bridges in the 1870s. American Arts Quarterly. Winter 2012: 27-34). The Pre-Raphaelite artistic style is characterized in part by having sensitivity to subtleties of the natural world. A proponent of this approach was the British writer and painter John Ruskin, who urged truth in illustrating nature and asserted that art should serve as a reflection of moral resolve (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/513091 /John-Ruskin). Bridges was invited to hear landscape painter William Trost Richards lecture at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1860, and there she resumed her art education. A further boon occurred with the opportunity to summer with the Richards family. In response to Ruskin’s influence, Richards had turned to painting scenes from nature in a manner directed to small specifics of plant life. It is thought that this philosophy was well impressed on Bridges; ie, the notion that with an authentic representation of a subject, its character could thus be imparted. Bridges began exhibiting her work at the Academy in 1862 and soon returned to Brooklyn where she showed several works with outdoorsy themes (Hill, pp 9-13). In Bird’s Nest and Ferns, the blue eggs are ensconced in a cozy nest of twigs and grasses. The nest is secured by intertwining nest elements among small branches of a sapling or shrub; ferns and viney flora appear to buttress the structure. There is almost a sense of reverence in the tranquil scene with the ambient light providing an outline of the halo of ferns encircling the nest. The reddish-brown rusty shades of forest sediments composed in part of fallen leaves convey a comforting sense of the earth, diminutive wildland dwellers likely scurrying about under the decaying layers. The erosion of the edge of a leaf in the foreground may reflect its proximity to energetic nest building activities. Another finely wrought nest, encompassed by silvery-green foliage, is seen in Bird’s Nest in Cattails (http://www .metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search /13390). Bridges received honors that included her election to the NationalAcademyofDesignas anassociate andgainingmembership in the American Society of Painters in Water Colors. For a time shewas engaged in commercial artistic activities in which she created illustrations. Bridges moved to Canaan, Connecticut, around 1892 to a site alongside the Blackberry River. Here she socializedwith friends and gardened, the latter effort documented in Richard’s Fidelia Bridge’s Garden in Canaan, Connecticut (http://www.nationalacademy.org /william-trost-richards-visions-of-land-and-sea/fidelia -bridges-garden-hr-2/). Despitedelights of the locale, she continued to paint into the turn of the century (Hill, pp 17-20). In words penned by Percy Bysshe Shelley in “To a Skylark,” he suggests that there is much to learn from the bird world: “Teach me half the gladness/That thy brain must know,/Such harmonious madness/Frommy lips would flow/The world should listen then, as I am listening now.” Perhaps few have been as attuned to the music of nature and portrayed it as endearingly as has Fidelia Bridges.